This vast volume contains some of the best, funniest, bleakest, most unsettling short stories I've ever read ... Incredibly good – a book to savour

The Times

Complicated characters, like twists, are among the orthodox pleasures on offer here ... You don't feel cheated, reading Boyle – while the head knows there's manipulation and artifice, the heart thumps

Observer

An important book that contains revelation, tension and beauty

Philip Womack, Daily Telegraph

Boyle has a talent for describing events we may never experience with an arresting matter-of-factness. There is a thrill to this, and to not knowing where he will take us next

Chris Power, Guardian

A sort of Frank Zappa of American letters … Like the Beat writers before him, Boyle documents American life in the underbelly … Boyle is incapable of writing a boring sentence ... he is a master of the short story form

Ian Thomson, Financial Times

The master of edgy short fiction

William Leith, Evening Standard